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Actualité courante
Mort de Amadou Diallo à New York City

Ginger Thompson
Prosecutors of 4 Police Officers Have Few
Examples to Guide Them

New York Times — April 2, 1999

No New York City police officer has ever been convicted of murder for actions in the line of duty, police officials and criminal justice experts said Thursday.

While four officers await trial on charges of second-degree murder in the shooting death of Amadou Diallo, recent history shows that even indictments of officers on those charges are rare and might signal a shift in the relationship between the courts and the police, and in the public's attitude toward the police.

In their appearance on Wednesday in Bronx County court, Officers Sean Carroll, Edward McMellon, Richard Murphy and Kenneth Boss all pleaded not guilty to the charges against them: two counts each of second-degree murder and one count each of reckless endangerment. If convicted of murder, they will face a maximum of 25 years to life in prison.

The officers, members of the Police Department's Street Crime Unit, fired 41 shots at Diallo in February as he stood in the vestibule of his apartment building in the Soundview section of the Bronx. Diallo, 22, a street peddler from West Africa, was unarmed.

Criminal justice experts and lawyers interviewed yesterday said there has been only one previous case in which a grand jury charged a New York City officer with murder: the case of Anthony Paparella. By the opening of that trial in 1992, prosecutors had reduced the charges to manslaughter and negligent homicide. The trial lasted a week, and Officer Paparella was acquitted.

In just a handful of cases, police officers have been convicted of charges less severe than murder, including one officer who was found guilty of manslaughter in 1997 and another who was convicted of negligent homicide in 1995.

The Diallo case, which has touched off protests across the city and shaken the administration of Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, marks a new climate in the public's attitude about the police, lawyers and scholars said.

Norman Siegel, executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, said that the shift in attitudes nationally began in 1991 with the Rodney King case, in which the police were videotaped beating King on a freeway in Los Angeles. Before that case, Siegel said, it was hard to get juries and judges to believe that police officers might lie about their conduct. And, he said, it was even harder to fight a reluctance by the courts to punish officers.

Before the King case, « there was enormous deference to police officers, » he said. « In the trials that took place, there was always a subliminal message sent out by the officers: 'We protect you and so you have to protect us. If you don't protect us, we won't protect you.' »

Siegel, often a vocal critic of the Police Department, added, « There has been a sea change on these issues, and it now presents an opportunity where you can get accountability if the facts warrant it, that not only will an officer be indicted, but they will also be convicted. »

History shows, however, that winning such convictions is extremely difficult. In a case that bears similarities to the Diallo shooting, five officers were indicted in 1991 in the death of Federico Pereira, 21, a cook in Queens. Prosecutors charged that the officers strangled Pereira while trying to subdue him after a fight.

Outrage over the case, which led to furious protests, was fanned by the videotape of the police beating of King, which was being widely shown on television.

Charges were eventually dropped against four of the officers. Officer Paparella, accused of strangling Pereira, was acquitted.

Officers have also been acquitted in other high-profile cases, including the death of Eleanor Bumpurs, an elderly, mentally-disturbed woman who was slain by shotgun blasts fired by the police into her Bronx apartment, and the 1994 case of Anthony Baez, 29, who died in a confrontation with the police after a late-night touch football game in the Bronx.

The officer charged in Baez's death, Francis X. Livoti, was acquitted in state court of criminally negligent homicide. Federal prosecutors, however, charged the officer with violating Baez's civil rights. Livoti was convicted and sentenced to seven and a half years in prison.

Andrew Karmen, a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and the author of « Crime and Justice in New York City, » said, « I think police officers get the benefit of the doubt, that in order to protect their lives and defend themselves they might take actions that might not be permissible if carried out by a civilian. »

In the cases of the New York officers convicted of committing homicide while on duty, no one was initially indicted on murder charges. In the most recent case, Officer Paolo Colecchia was convicted of second-degree manslaughter in 1997 for fatally shooting an unarmed man in the Bronx. The man, Nathaniel Levi Gaines, 25, died from a gunshot wound to the back. Colecchia was sentenced to one and a half to four and a half years in prison.

In 1995, Jonas Bright, a former New York City housing police officer, was convicted of criminally negligent homicide in the death of Douglas Orfly, whom he shot while searching for a burglary suspect. Bright was sentenced to one to four years in prison. And in 1977, Officer Thomas Ryan of the 44th Precinct was convicted of criminally negligent homicide in the beating death of Israel Rodriguez.

Except for a rule that protects officers from administrative interviews in the first 48 hours after they wound or kill someone in the line of duty, scholars say, New York officers have no special legal tools that help them avoid conviction.

« They have the support of unions, and so they can afford legal defenses that are not available to the average person, » said Alfred Blumstein of Carnegie-Mellon University. « But their most effective tool is an emotional appeal, that they had to make an instantaneous, life-and-death decision and that they were doing their duty. »